Overview

Water vapour's interaction with light is fundamental to understanding the Earth's climate, extrasolar planets (including attempts to detect life) and the chemistry of the interstellar medium. The discussion meeting will focus on fundamental developments in the spectroscopy of water, including its continuum, its role in the Earth's energy budget, and latest astronomical observations, including those from the Herschel space telescope.

Professor Jonathan Tennyson

Massey Professor of Physics and Head of Department, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London (UCL)

Jonathan Tennyson gained a BA in Natural Sciences from King's College, Cambridge in 1977 and a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Sussex in 1980. He spent a productive two years as Royal Society Western European Exchange Fellow at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, In 1982 he joined the Theory Group at Daresbury Laboratory. He was appointed a “New Blood” lecturer at University College London in Theoretical Atomic Physics in 1985. He became Professor of Physics in 1994; was Head of Department in 2004-11 and became Massey Professor of Physics in 2005. He was elected an FRS in 2009.

His research interests cover a range of topics on the theory of small molecules. In particular I compute spectra of these molecules (such as water) and collide electrons (and occasionally positrons) with them. He is interested in the astrophysical, atmospheric and other consequences of these processes. He recently started a new project, ExoMol (www.exomol.com), aimed at calculating comprehensive line lists for models exoplanets and other hot atmosphere.

Professor Keith Shine

Regius Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading

"Keith Shine is Professor of Physical Meteorology at the University of Reading. He graduated in Physics from Imperial College in 1978 and gained his PhD in Meteorology from the University of Edinburgh in 1981. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009. His primary research area is ""radiative processes and climate"" and his current interests include the role of water vapour in the climate system, the impact of aviation on climate change (and vice versa) and the quantification of the radiative forcing of climate change due to changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases. He has been involved in several Working Group 1 reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including being a Lead Author on its First Assessment Report in 1990 and as a Review Editor for its recently completed Fifth Assessment Report"
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Professor Ewine van Dishoeck, Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands

Ewine F van Dishoeck is a full professor of astronomy at Leiden University, the Netherlands, where she received her PhD in 1984 cum laude. From 1984-1990, she held positions at Harvard, Princeton and Caltech before moving back to Leiden in 1990. As of 2008, she is also an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institut f"ur Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany. Her research group focusses on molecules in star- and planet-forming regions and the importance of molecules as diagnostics of the physical processes, using observations at submillimeter and infrared wavelengths. She holds many national and international science policy functions, including scientific director of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA), member of the Board of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and PI of the Herschel key program on 'Water In Star-forming regions with Herschel'(WISH). She has received various honors and awards for her research.
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Professor Peter Bernath

"Peter Bernath received his B.Sc. degree in Chemistry (Physics option) from the University of Waterloo (1976) and his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from MIT in 1981. After a post-doctoral stint at the National Research Council, he became a faculty member at the University of Arizona. In 1991 he took up a position as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, followed by a move in 2006 to the University of York, UK, and is now Chair of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA. His research interests are in laboratory spectroscopy, molecular astronomy and atmospheric science. Since 1998, he has been mission scientist for the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment (ACE) satellite.

Spectroscopic observations of exoplanets are now possible by transit methods and direct emission. Spectroscopic requirements for exoplanets will be reviewed based on existing measurements and model predictions for hot Jupiters and super-Earths. Molecular opacities needed to simulate astronomical observations can be obtained from laboratory measurements, ab initio calculations or a combination of the two approaches. The talk will focus mainly on laboratory spectroscopy of hot molecules as needed for exoplanets.

Dr Jonathan Taylor, Met Office, UK

Jonathan graduated from the University of Reading with a Joint Honours Degree in Physics and Meteorology in 1988. He then joined the Meteorological Research Flight at the UK Met Office and whilst working for the Met Office completed a PhD, in 1993, at University of Reading on The Remote Retrieval of Stratiform Water Cloud Radiative and Microphysical Properties - using data gathered by the Met Office C130 aircraft.

Jonathan has been involved in airborne research observations throughout his career and his team utilise the FAAM Bae146 Atmospheric Research Aircraft. Jonathan is now Head of Observations Based Research at the Met Office managing all the Met Office involvement in airborne research observations and overseeing the boundary layer measurement site at Cardington Bedfordshire.

One focus of Jonathan's research has been the development of new techniques to better utilise data from the Infra-red Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer ( IASI) which flies on the Metop satellite and is co-chairman of the Eumetsat hosted IASI Sounding Science Working Group. Jonathan has served as an associate editor for the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. He won the LF Richardson Prize from the Royal Met Soc in 1996 and the LG Groves Memorial Prize for Observations in 2009.

Professor Jean-Michel Hartmann, Université Paris, France

Jean‐Michel Hartmann attended the Ecole Centrale Paris where he got an engineer degree (1983) and a PhD (1986) before being hired by the French national center for scientific research (CNRS). After ten years (1983‐1992) in the LEM2C in Ecole Centrale, he joined the Orsay university campus (LPMA and LPPM labs), before joining the LISA in Créteil in 2000. He is now Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS. His research, mainly theoretical, is in the area of spectroscopy and of its applications for atmospheric soundings, with emphasis on the effects of collisions (of pressure) on the shape of absorption/emission spectra of molecular gases, a subject on which he has co‐written a recently published book.

Dr Oleg Polyansky, Russian Academy of Science, Russia

Oleg Polyansky received his diploma degree in radiophysics from the Gorky State University, USSR, (1979). The same year he became a junior research fellow at the Applied Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Science (USSR at that time). His PhD work has been done at this Institute and defended at Tomsk University in 1993. By that time he was a senior research fellow of the same institute. After receiving his PhD he won the Humboldt fellowship, which he spent with Prof. Manfred Winnewisser and Professor Per Jensen in Giessen, Germany. In 1995 he took a postdoc position at University College London with Professor Jonathan Tennyson. He spent the years 2004 to 2006 as a researcher at Ulm University, Germany, and the years up to 2008 as a visiting professor at UCL. At the moment he is a group leader and leading research fellow in his home town (now called Nizhny Novgorod) at the Applied Physics Institute, Russia. His research interests are in the development and application of methods for the high precision calculation of the spectra of small molecules and ions, and analysis of their spectra at high excitation, including high temperatures and dissociation.

Dr Joseph Hodges, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA

Joseph T Hodges has degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University (BSc 1981) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD 1989). He was a postdoctoral fellow for two years at l’Institut Français du Pétrole, and since 1991 he has been a research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland USA. His research interests include laser combustion diagnostics, light scattering and absorption properties of aerosols, development of advanced primary standards for the generation and measurement of humidity, and high-resolution cavity-enhanced laser absorption techniques for high-accuracy measurements of spectroscopic line parameters and gas concentration.

State-resolved spectroscopy of high vibrational levels of water up to the dissociative continuum

Dr Pavlo Maksyutenko, Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland

Pavlo Maksyutenko (1979) graduated Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Ukraine, with a MSc degree in Applied Physics in 2003. Next year he joined the group of Professor Thomas Rizzo at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he got his PhD in 2008, studying multiple-resonance vibrational spectroscopy of water and methanol molecules. He spent 1.5 years as a PostDoc in the laboratory of Professor Ralf I Kaiser at the University of Hawaii studying reaction dynamics in crossed molecular beams, relevant to planetary atmospheres, combustion and interstellar medium. Recently he moved back to Switzerland to work as a PostDoc in Nonlinear Optics laboratory of General Energy department at Paul Scherrer Institute.

Dr Stuart Newman, Met Office, UK

Stuart Newman obtained a BSc in Chemical Physics at the University of Bristol in 1996, and stayed in Bristol to complete a PhD on the electronic spectroscopy of atmospherically-important molecules using cavity ring-down and Fourier transform spectroscopy. Since joining the Met Office in 1999 Stuart has used airborne interferometer observations to investigate issues of importance to infrared remote sensing, including sea- and land-surface emissivity, fundamental spectroscopy, satellite calibration and validation, and 1-dimensional variational retrievals of atmospheric species. Most recently Stuart has worked on the remote sensing of volcanic ash following the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, alongside water vapour continuum studies as part of the CAVIAR consortium.

Determination of water vapour continuum absorption coefficients from recent observations

Dr Eli Mlawer, Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc, USA

Dr Mlawer is a Senior Scientist and the Leader of the Atmospheric Composition and Radiation Section at AER. His main research interests are atmospheric radiative transfer and climate. Dr Mlawer has primary responsibility for the design, implementation, and validation of RRTM, a radiative transfer model for climate applications used by many climate and weather prediction models. He is the co-leader of the Continual Intercomparison of Radiation Codes (CIRC) effort to evaluate the quality of radiation codes used in climate simulations. Dr Mlawer was co-Principal Investigator of the two Radiative Heating in Underexplored Bands Campaigns (RHUBC), field experiments that took place in northern Alaska (2007) and Chile (2009) directed at increasing our understanding of key radiative processes in the far-infrared spectral region. He is the developer of the MT_CKD water vapour continuum model, a key component in the majority of existing atmospheric radiative transfer models. Dr Mlawer received a BA degree in mathematics and astronomy from Williams College, a B.A. and M.A. in physics from Cambridge University, and a PhD in physics from Brandeis University.

Measurements of the atmospheric water vapour continuum using a solar-pointing Fourier Transform Spectrometer

Dr Tom Gardiner, National Physical Laboratory, UK

Tom Gardiner has 20 years of experience on the development and implementation of advanced trace gas monitoring techniques, and the assessment of the calibration requirements and uncertainty analysis of such measurement techniques. This work has included the development of new laser-based techniques for remote sensing systems, including a novel injection-seeded optical parametric oscillator and a near-infrared tunable diode laser spectrometer. His extensive field measurement experience has included more than a dozen international campaigns studying tropospheric and stratospheric science issues. These campaigns have included ground-based measurements involving Fourier Transform and laser heterodyne spectrometers, remote measurements using UV and IR differential absorption lidars, and balloon-and aircraft-based measurements with laser absorption spectrometers. He is a member of the Infrared Working Group of the international Network for the Detection of Stratospheric Change, and sits on the steering committee of the GCOS Reference Upper Air Network.

Recent advances in measurement of the water vapour continuum in the far-IR spectral region

Dr Paul Green, Imperial College London, UK

"Dr Paul Green studied at Manchester University (MPhys 1998) and Imperial College (PhD 2003) after which he has been working at Imperial College as a Postdoctoral Researcher. He became a Scholar Freeman of London via the award of a post-graduate scholarship from the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers in 2001 and elected as a member of the Institute of Physics, and Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2005.

Dr Green’s research interests centre on tropospheric clear-sky and cloud radiative effects in the far-IR (16-125µm). His PhD thesis work concentrated on clear-sky spectroscopy, in the form of the water vapour pure rotation band continuum. I have also undertaken studies of the radiative effects of cirrus cloud in the infrared, with flight campaigns both in the UK and Australia looking at both frontal and tropical convection-generated cirrus, as well as the arctic ground-based RHUBC measurement campaign.

Dr Green is the current TAFTS instrument mentor and has been involved with the development, maintenance and deployment of this instrument on various experimental campaigns.

He is currently back studying the far-IR water vapour continuum through analysis of measurements from the RHUBC and CAVIAR projects.

Dr Rod Jones, University of Cambridge, UK

"Roderic L Jones is Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge. He obtained his first degree in Physics at the University of Oxford before obtaining a DPhil in Atmospheric Physics, also at Oxford and spent 5 years at the UK Meteorological Office before moving to the Department of Chemistry in Cambridge in 1990. His main research interests are in studies of the structure and composition of the atmosphere, focusing on a wide range of issues from local air quality to global climate change, with an emphasis on both the detection of trends, and studies of the processes which control the chemical composition and physical structure of the earth’s atmosphere.

A particular interest of his research team is the development and exploitation of novel observational techniques, ranging from ultra-sensitive spectroscopic techniques which form the basis of his laboratory studies of water vapour absorption, through to miniaturised chemical sensors and sensor network systems.

He has over 100 peer reviewed publications, has been closely involved with numerous national and international scientific assessments and currently holds NERC, EPSRC and EU research awards totalling approximately £5M.

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IR shifts of the water dimer from the fully exible ab initio HBB2 potential

Professor Claude Leforestier, Université Montpellier, France

Claude Leforestier obtained his BSc (1973) and PhD (1980) degrees from the Université Paris Sud in Orsay and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas in Austin (1980{1981). He was visiting professor at the University of California in Berkeley (1992-1993). After holding a research associate position (1975-1987) at the French national research centre, he became Theoretical Chemistry Professor at the Université Paris Sud in Orsay. In 1995 he moved to the Université Montpellier. He co-authored more than 100 scientific publications. His field of interests concerns Molecular Reaction Dynamics, with special emphasis on Molecular Spectroscopy. Mainly interested in methodological developments, he pioneered ab initio molecular dynamics (1978), and investigated the atmospheric UV photodissociation of ozone. Recent work concerns methodological developments for the calculation of highly excited states of polyatomics and of molecular clusters.

The water-vapour continuum absorption in the mid-infrared10 and 4 μm atmospheric windows

<p>.Dr Yuri Baranov was born in 1954 in Novgorod region of Russia. In 1980 he graduated from St Peterburg (former Leningrad) State University with specialization: “Theoretical and Applied Molecular Spectroscopy”. In 1982 he defended PhD thesis. Since 1980 Baranov has been with the Institute of Experimental Meteorology of the Russian Federal Agency on Hydrometeorology and Environment Protection. In 2001-2004, 2006-2007 and 2009 Baranov was invited to National Institute of Standards and Technology to carry out studies of collision induced absorption. His scientific interests include collision induced and continual absorption of IR radiation by the major atmospheric species, atmospheric spectroscopy.</p>
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Igor V Ptashnik graduated from the Physics Department at the Novosibirsk State University (Russia) in 1984 (master degree in Optics and Spectroscopy). He worked for 6 years as an experimentalist in the Institute of Atmospheric Optics, Tomsk (Russia). In 1990 he changed his area of interest from experimental study to numerical simulation of atmospheric absorptional processes. In 1996 he received PhD degree from Russian Academy of Science (RAS) for thesis "Mathematical modelling of the optical absorptional remote sensing of atmospheric gases". In 2001-2003 Dr Ptashnik worked in the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading investigating different mechanisms of the absorption of solar radiation by water vapour in the Earth atmosphere. In 2007 he defended a 'Doctor of Science' degree of RAS with the thesis "Continuum absorption by water vapour within near-infrared bands".

Currently DrSc Ptashnik is a senior staff scientist in the Institute of Atmospheric Optics RAS (Russia). Since 2007 he has also been working in the University of Reading as a Senior Research Fellow and coordinator of CAVIAR consortium (Continuum Absorption at Visible and Infrared and its Atmospheric Relevance).

Dr France Allard, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, France

Dr France Allard is the first and a world renowned expert for nearly twenty years as an atmosphere modeler for very low mass stars (VLMs), brown dwarfs (BDs), and extrasolar giant planets (EGPs). She obtained a PhD in astrophysics at the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg in 1990. She was recruited on a research grant at the University of Montreal for 3 years till 1993. After this appointment she occupied a position of sessionnal lecturer at the British Columbia University in astronomy for 2 years till May 1995, and became a research assistant at The Wichita State University for 2 years till 1997. Finally she was received as an invited professor at the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (CRAL) for 10 months till May 1998, and was received at a permanent responsibility CNRS position at CRAL till today. In June 2004, she obtained the Habilitation, and was among the most recent CNRS employee to be promoted at the level of Director of Research (CNRS) in 2008.

Among Dr Allard’s achievements is the first realistic model atmosphere grid spanning the complete range of parameters of VLMs and BDs. This is soon to be followed in 2001 with one of the first study of dust clouds formation in VLMs and BDs atmospheres. These model atmosphere grids (NextGen ‘99, Cond/Dusty ’01, BT-Settl ‘10) allowed several advances: i) for the first time the use of non-grey model atmospheres as a surface boundary conditions to interior and evolution models; ii) the determination of the temperature scale of VLMs; iii) the characterization of brown dwarfs at the stellar boundary via the lithium test and/or by spectral synthesis, and by realistic theoretical isochrones fitting; iv) the discovery and characterization of ever lower mass brown dwarfs (of surveys e.g. CFBDS, UKIDSS to name the most recent) the characterization of Hot Jupiters upon their discovery with the detection of water vapor in 2007; and vi) the constraint of the detectability of planetary mass objects and biosignatures using observing instruments (SPHERE, DARWIN among the most recent). Most recently, Dr. Allard is also known worldwide for 2-3D radiation hydrodynamic simulations of the atmospheres of VLMs, BDs, and EGPs in presence of dust cloud formation and rotation since 2005.

Dr Giovanna Tinetti, University College London, UK

Biography

Dr Giovanna Tinetti is a Royal Society URF and Reader at the University College London, where she leads a team on exoplanets since 2007. Dr Tinetti received her PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Turin (Italy) in 2003 and then moved to Caltech in the US and Paris in France to work on exoplanetary atmospheres supported by NASA and ESA fellowships. She received the 2011 Institute of Physics Moseley Medal for her pioneering work on the use of infrared, primary transit spectroscopy to characterise the molecular composition of extra solar planets.

Dr Tinetti has led the successful proposal for the mission candidate EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory), a space telescope dedicated to the study of exoplanetary atmospheres, currently under study by the European Space Agency. She is an editor for Icarus, the planetary journal of the American Astronomical Society. She has authored more than eighty refereed publications.

Professor Edwin A. Bergin, University of Michigan, USA

Edwin Bergin is a leading scientist in the area of theoretical and observational studies of the chemistry and physics in star and planet forming molecular gas. He has also played an important role in a number of observational projects, including being a key member of the science team for NASAs Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS). Currently he is the principle investigator of a guaranteed time key program on the Herschel Space Observatory and serves as a co-investigator on several other key programs that place strong focus on the search for water in interstellar space. One of his specialties is the study of water vapour during the epoch of stellar birth and on the trail that leads to the formation of water-rich terrestrial worlds.